VG Tuesday Tips: New Features for Cloud Network Management

With the Network’s Edge more broad and diverse than ever, organizations cannot afford to have IT professionals at every site to fix every problem or carry out each deployment. In other words, cloud management is a must-have for saving time and money.

Cradlepoint NetCloud Manager’s new tier, NetCloud Manager Enterprise, comes with significant enhancements and features that are primarily for branch location and mobile use:

- NetCloud Manager Prime (primarily for mobile): Comes with all Standard features plus advanced routing and location services and mapping.

- NetCloud Manager Enterprise (primarily for branches): Comes with all Prime features plus application analytics and secure web filtering. NetCloud Manager (NCM) Enterprise lets IT professionals see what bandwidth is being consumed by what applications.

Application Analytics

With NCM Enterprise’s application analytics, IT staff can see who is consuming network bandwidth as well as what applications are being used to consume it. It essentially offers complete application visibility and control, enabling IT teams to manipulate the network based on application activity. Administrators can see what applications are running on the network and the traffic those applications are generating; then they can implement policy rules where needed.

NCM Enterprise essentially shows not just the volume of data but where it is all going. IT staff can monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot beyond the network layer, at an application layer. Network performance can be optimized based on application usage, making the entire network — including any firewalls — application-aware.

Enterprise also comes with several predefined URL categories to help IT departments keep users and the network itself safe, both in terms of preventing users from downloading malware, for example, and in preventing bad user experiences while connected.

Additionally, NCM Enterprise can allow IT staff to see:

- What the most frequently used application categories are.

- What the most frequently used applications are within those categories.

- What percentage of bandwidth is going to a particular category (such as social media).

- Which users are monopolizing certain categories, such as streaming videos.

IT administrators can even block a particular user or users straight from the dashboard; they also can block certain applications, such as Facebook or Netflix, altogether. NCM Enterprise application analytics offers excellent visibility and control of all network traffic.